Day: October 7, 2017

I think you’re supposed to write poetry on post-its and photos and leave it stickied or scattered around, but that seems to me to be self-serving littering. Let’s face it, most people are not good poets. I, for example, suck at poetry. Love it, can’t write it. But oh, do I love it.

Robert Frost was evidently a bastard to live with, but he wrote beautiful poetry. Every place I’ve ever lived, I’ve painted or posted my favorite lines of his on a wall (it’s from “Two Tramps at Mudtime”):

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

The whole poem is incredibly beautiful, but it’s those last lines that gave me my life philosophy on work: if I can’t be passionate about what I need to do, I need to do something I’m passionate about instead. Yes, I know that’s impossible for most people, I’m just happy it’s worked out for me twice.

So how are you going to commit random acts of poetry? Posting some here is a non-littering method. I’m going to try to figure out where in my practically wall-less off I can put those four lines (there are walls, there are just windows and doors in 90% of them). Maybe on a Post-It . . .

About the Author

Jennifer Crusie is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author of twenty novels, one book of literary criticism, miscellaneous articles, essays, novellas, and short stories, and the editor of three essay anthologies. She lives in a cottage in New Jersey surrounded by deer, bears, foxes, and dachshunds, where she often stares at the ceiling and counts her blessings.